


Besieged

by wildechilde17



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:09:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26595793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildechilde17/pseuds/wildechilde17
Summary: Raised up by a dead queen all that is wanted of young Lord Gendry is that he looks like a Baratheon and acts like a lord long enough to get a wife and some heirs on her. No one has asked the new Baratheon what he wants.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters
Comments: 29
Kudos: 102





	1. the storm-wind rolls

The humidity wakes him. He is thick with sweat, and the feather bed is suffocating. He drags the linen from where it has wrapped and strangled his legs and sits pushing down on the hard wooden edge of the bed to remind himself of something strong and unyielding something the opposite of the swollen, fleshy softness. The sky is dark, and through the thick warping glass, he can see lights flicker over the bay. The storm is coming.

He despises this castle, dislikes the fine tapestries strung about its halls. It displeases him that there are so many halls.

He runs his hands through his hair, it grows each day and takes him further from the man who she touched, threatened, lay with. He fancies that even his hands grow softer.

He is a puppet here, his only value not in his hard work but in his resemblance to a dead king, a whoremonger and useless sot. He is not allowed to work. Honest labour is no longer his right. He must play his part, or these lands will fall to rebellion and chaos, and the smallfolk will be the ones that pay for his stubbornness. Davos had repeated that line enough times on the journey from Kings Landing, he no longer hears the words in his own voice but in the Onion Knight's.

He'd accepted this existence for reasons that were now't to be seen. The molten steel of fury and bile rise in his gullet. He thought he'd have a say in his fate. He thought there'd be no more lords and princes and sers controlling all he did and said, whether he lived or died, starve or ate.

The light flashes again a rumble of sound moving through the stone soon after. In a flash, the sky is a familiar grey.

She'd tried to tell him that her life was not freedom, but all he'd seen was food in bellies and her ability to look people in the eye. Gods, he was stupid.

The morning will come too soon, and it will be back to ink stains upon his fingers as he practices his letters with the Maester and petitions with the Castellan where he does little but keep his disagreements with the justice meted out beneath his scowl. His only relief is playing at fighting with the master at arms who insists that he must also learn to wield a sword though the war hammer is a serviceable reminder of his father, milord.

Father

Milord

Two words that bring him to boil more than humidity, duty, the grey sky flashing at him as though it was beneath thick brown lashes.

His face is too clean and his chin too freshly shaven, but he will not let that rough and bristled hair grow lest he look any more like the man who fucked him into his mother's belly.

No, instead he looks like the man whose name Brienne of Tarth whispered reverently when he plunged a spear through Biter. He remembers the whisper almost hidden by the wet meaty sound of spear through neck. He did not wrest the spear from the wall for the Maid of Tarth with her questions about his mother, his father. He did it for the girl with the list. He thought her dead then. Taken by the Hound, they'd said, dead at the twins or maybe married to the new Lord Bolton. They'd told him such things when he's made his way back from the other man they say he looked like: the other man and his red witch.

And he'd stayed at the inn for the girl with the list too. He stayed where she might return, just like he had refusing to believe that the winter storm in her eyes could be broken by the Bolton Bastard. Hoping she still lived.

He protected the orphans like she had once with the weasel girl.

There wasn't one thing he had done since leaving Kings Landing with Yoren that hadn't been because of that girl and her steel eyes.

He's accepted lands and titles for reasons that were now't to be seen.

Before he woke, he'd dreamed he was sinking into the mud with her. The rain never stopped, and the mud of Harrenhal was swallowing them as she recited a list of names in an empty voice that no girl of her years should have.

He splashes his face with the still water in the basin, it tastes wrong on his tongue. Wellwater, not layered with stream silt or the filth of every man, woman and child in a stinking city filled to the brink with men, women and children.

He wipes the water from his face with the flat of his hand. The towel is soiled, and he does not want it near his face. It will smell like regret and lust and is still damp with his spend.

He does not like the featherbed he only falls into sleep when he exhausts himself, bringing himself to the brink against the callouses of his hand and the flashes of ripe mouth, wide eyes and indecent curves of thickened white scars behind his own eyelids.

He knows the girls that work in these rooms and the laundry that flit about with accents that sound as good as foreign will note it all and giggle among themselves. One or two have made advances to remedy the need for so many clean towels. Once he might have rung their bells for them. Their offers only make the sourness curdle in his stomach, and he scowls, mutters and shies from them like a horse with a thrown shoe and a novice smith.

She doesn't want him even with the lands and servants, and yet he stays stubbornly determined to ignore her insistence that he marry someone else. His stubbornness is all he has left.

The whole of Westeros may as well be this stupid featherbed smothering him with its plans for him and its absence of her.

He pulls on his pants, not allowing thoughts to start to ferment on the nature of laces and how quickly knots can be undone. He makes for the turrets and wall walks of the outer wall. He craves air even if it is afire with the static of the oncoming storm.

His feet beat a rhythm out on the drum of Storm's End. He paces, and the wind picks at his shirt. The first of the ravens came the day before yesterday. He stared at the letters stretching the sounds in practice even after the Maester had told him of the contents and then all too patiently told him of their meaning.

Daughters of Bannermen are set to swarm.

Soon perhaps daughters of the remainders of once-great houses of the Westerlands and Riverlands will come dance attendance upon his household. There is no stopping them, Ladies with less choice in the matter than even this bastard made lord. Ladies the like of Lady Stark or Lady Smallwood, he supposes, though it has been made clear that they may be much younger or older than he. The Tyrell girl was older and married to that babe in arms of a king, least that's what they tell him.

He doesn't rightly know how old he is, and he does not want to be messing with little girls. These highborns have such strange ideas when it comes to love. But it isn't love they want from him. They want a marriage and heirs. They want continuity.

None of them, not even Davos, has asked him what he wants.

He knew her when she was a girl, but he was not much more than a boy then, and she had a flame inside her that might warm him or consume him. He'd followed her knowing the flame meant survival before he knew it meant anything more.

He knew her again when she was a woman grown, and he was not much more than a man. And the gods laughed at him. Smith, they said, you know better than to stand too close to the flame. But he didn't know. He didn't know he couldn't quench the flame she lit in him.

It isn't family they want from him. Only one person has ever wanted to be his family.

The storm is almost upon the cliff face now. The wind roars in his ears and whips his face into a pink glow. By the lightning, he can see the silhouette of a ship flash in and out of being. He'll hear of it come morning, the bay is not called shipbreakers for nought.


	2. Vext of the sea-driv'n rain

He ate at the high table in the large hall. The porridge was thick and hot, and the cook or the girl who brought it to him had laid a thick curl of honey at its centre. He didn't need to break his fast in the hall. Some highborns did so in their rooms having those in service carry heaping trays with hot water and thick bacon up uneven stairs before they even woke. He could not bear the thought of it. 

This is where Ser Davos found him, hunched over the bowl remembering the inn at the crossroads and what hard black bread tasted like when he’d eaten nothing but turning apples in days. 

“My lord,” said Ser Davos. 

“You knew me when I was in my uncle’s cells waiting to die at the hands of that witch,” he barely raises his eyes. The hall is filling with men of standing and those who serve. “How many times do I have to tell you to stop with the lords.” 

Davos only smiles, “I’ll let you know when you’ve hit upon the number. What’s put such a smile on your face.”

“Sleep was hard to come by.”

The old knight nods dragging a chair from its resting place. “Used to be I could never sleep without the rocking of the waves beneath me.”

“What changed?”

“Well, I don’t rightly know.” He rubs his greying beard with a gloved hand. “Could be that eventually, every man must sleep."

“Hmpf.”

“You’ve got food in your belly, a roof above your head and dragons in your pocket. Should probably make the best of it, my lad. I’d say you’ve used your moons grace up. Time to act like you want this.” 

“You think I want this?”

“Is it the flea bottom accent that makes you take me for a fool?” the old man says as though his accent was any thicker than Gendry’s own. “I didn’t want it for you either. The way out was when the Dragon Queen died and that ships sailed.” Gendry winces on the thought of ships. “Make the best of it, for your children, for the small folk and for the sake of your pretty face.”

He pulls away from his bowl, then squaring his shoulders, “I ain’t pretty.”

Davos only smiles again, “Mayhaps it’s youth then. Your mother never told you not to make that face, or it would stick like it?"   
For a brief moment, Gendry wonders if this is how Davos spoke to his uncle, the man who he saw but once and recalls his face only in restless dreams. He even imagines the pressure of the man's fingers around his jaw. The pressure that said as much as any words he uttered, you're not a person, boy, you're grist for my mill. He can’t imagine that man would tolerate the twinkle in Davos’s eye, let alone the jabs. He can't imagine the man who would take a man's fingers just to raise him up would have looked any more kindly on being called pretty. 

His finger is in the place where his chin indents before his lip even before he is aware he is doing it. 

Davos seems well amused with himself. There is no point in talking about how little he remembers of his mother, her yellow hair and the three or so words he can remember from songs he's not heard again. The sourness is not Davos’s fault any more than it is the weather's or the tapestry of the leaping stag hanging from the far wall. 

“What lording do I have to do today?”

“About that,” the old man replies and takes a bite of his bread.

“What?” 

The man chews and, gods, he chews for an age before he swallows, “You need to be speaking with your Maester, Castellan. I’m heading home.” Gendry’s brow furrows. “You're settled. I've a wife, and I'd like to see her before I'm asked to fight grumpkins in the war for the afternoon tea.”

“but-”

“-you could order me to-“

“-I’ll not order you to anything,” he says just as quickly as he wishes he could order the man to stay. There is nothing for it. People are people. Even if you’ve come to depend upon them being where you put them last. They should have a choice in their fates. And, by the seven, he’d never even thought to ask the man about his family. He’d said he’d become a lord and a knight for the sake of his sons and that they’d died and Gendry had ignored it all. Too caught up, he was, in the rotten humiliation of trusting Beric and his brotherhood and the bitter resignation of death. He swallows down hard, “You’ve a wife you should see her. Love’s a good thing.”

Davos Seaworth tilts his greying head, “You don’t sound so sure.” Gendry does his best not to provide soft soil for that shovel. Davos laughs drily, “Don’t know how much love she’ll have for me now.”

“What’s she like?” He wants her to be fair and loving, he wants her to be resolute and welcoming. It seems a man such as the Onion Knight should have a woman made in the image of the mother. 

“Marya? Oh, a spitfire sure enough and the best woman in the world."

“Then she’ll love you still,” he says gruffly looking away from the warmth in Davos’s eyes. 

“You survived the long night and all the wars before and after, Lord Gendry.” The hall is not the grey of steel, of armour before the enamelling or bluing. It's the grey of mottled dead skin, he decides. It is the grey of winter furs, waterlogged in melting ice. “You’ll survive being a high lord.”

“Aye. I’ll survive,” Gendry repeats because he is nothing if not a fighter. He swigs his ale. “Ladies are coming.”

“Then you’ll do more than survive,” Davos Seaworth chuckles. 

“I don’t want a lady," he says, and he really doesn't, wouldn't know what to do with all their soft skirts and poetry. “I don’t hardly know how to look one in the eye.”

“Ser Gilbert, Maester Jurne, Lord Elwood, will find you one who will know all that and be pleasing to it as well. Any Lady would be lucky to have you-“

“-stop.” His voice sounds louder and more drenched in the undercurrent of fury that has run within him like an aquifer collecting the sediment of his misgiving and affronts.

“My lord?” 

“I have lessons, letters, histories," he says standing. He adjusts his surcoat.

He never had a father beyond the time he put into making him. He scarcely had a mother. Master Mott was a master not in any way a familial figure. He ate when he had worked enough to eat, he slept when he was ordered, and he was beat when he was surly. He did not rightly know what a true family would be beyond the stories she had told him of castles and brothers and Wolfswood that sounded like tales for children more than truth.

And yet, "You'll come before you leave?"

"Aye," Davos says, rising to match him.

Gendry nods. 

“My Lord, Ser Davos.” Ser Gilbert Farring is a man a head taller than Davos with thick chestnut hair and a beard a shade darker. There is nothing exceptionally patient or open about the man. Still, Davos says that his loyalty to the rightful Baratheon heir is unquestioned.

“Ser Gilbert.”

"We must discuss the lumbar and wool exports for the annum and the repairs to the northern wall." They say discuss when they mean to tell him what they have done. "Should I come to you after Maester Jurne?”

“Yes, after.”

“Of course, My Lord.”

“What other news?” he asks rather than dismissing him. He loathes that he must dismiss people. Should they not just know when they are unwanted. 

“No news, My Lord,” says the castellan raising a well-groomed brow.

“What of the wreck last night?” 

"Shipwreck? There's not been a wreck in the bay for many-”

“-Last night, there was a ship in the storm." He speaks of one particular ship, he does not need the figures of shipwrecks why do they not just answer.

“I can send to Massey’s hook, Estermont and Tarth?” Farring says. Gendry sees the way that Seaworth and Farring look at each other.

“Mayhaps a trick of the light, My Lord?” Says Davos. 

There is no point in arguing. He isn’t a Stormlander, a lord, a true born heir. Who would take the word of a smith from Fleabottom for all the fine leathers they dress him in. “’haps.”

“No ship would enter the bay unless under great duress, at night, in a storm?” Farring echoes no doubt catching the darkening of Gendry’s brow. 

“I’ve lessons.”

“Yes, My Lord.” It sounds as if the whole hall speaks in unison as he leaves. They back away parting like corn husks from the cob. The skin at his neck prickles.


End file.
